Business Insight Zone

Sorry to shout, but I want to make sure the emphasis is clear:

• CUSTOMERS
• CUSTOMERS
• CUSTOMERS

It’s one of my fundamental tenets of all business, whether you’re running IBM or a taco truck: if you’re finding the right customers, and putting your best efforts into serving customers, and aligning all of your business practices so that you provide maximum value to customers at costs you can live with and prices they can live with . . . you’ll be fine.

Now for a very simple lesson that’s too often overlooked — or undercooked — in companies large and small:

How you collect, organize, and use business information should reinforce your emphasis on CUSTOMERS.

A thousand questions cascade from this one idea, including many that are rather abstract:

• If you’re collecting information by hand — how will you organize it for use in finding and serving customers?
• If you get information from a service like us (and, ahem, we happen to have the most and best business information you can find anywhere), what will you do with it that will help you find or serve customers?
• Do you know all the uses of the information ahead of time?
• Do you have a process for discovering and adopting new uses as you go?
• . . .

And then there are pragmatic questions galore:

• Does everybody in your outfit who needs to know the answers to the questions above know them? (Researchers? Marketers? Salespeople? Your CIO? Your CFO? All the big bosses?)
• Does what they understand mesh with the IT department’s ability to package and deliver the information, whether it’s through a complex data warehouse, a CRM, or simply a set of spreadsheets?
• Does the technological capacity mesh with the ability of your sales ops, fulfillment, and finance teams to track the right account information back to the right customer? Every time?
• . . .

You can fill in the blanks with more questions like these depending on your own situation. (And please feel free to share these questions in the comments.)

Remember that some of the answers to these questions need not be overly complex or expensive. For instance, if you and I decide to open a business together, just the two of us, we might be able to run our whole book of business from a few shared spreadsheets.

Easy, right? Sure — but even then, you and I would need to get some discipline around what information comes in, how we collect it, where we store it, and what we do with it. Even if you run a solo business, you need to answer these questions, because otherwise customers — business! cash money! — falls through the cracks.

Sum it all up, and the real core discipline lies in answering this question:

Which piece of information triggers which action toward which customer?

Until you know that, you can spend all the money you want on a CRM system . . . we could give you the keys to Hoover’s and you could drown yourself in company and industry information . . . you could store terabytes of data . . . and it still won’t drive the performance that your business — and its CUSTOMERS — deserve.

Don’t you agree?

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Related posts:

• Customer ANYTHING.
• Get on the phone!

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Image by Oran Viriyincy, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

If you care at all about customer service — and you should — read this post from my friend Russ Somers:

Customer Satisfaction Isn’t a Nastysickle

As if the post didn’t deliver enough goodness, Russ nails down a point in the comment thread that many companies would be wise to grasp:

Some companies (Zappos and Southwest come to mind) have employees who seem to have more good days than employees at other companies. If you view customer service as a competitive advantage, suddenly you start to manage your business to give your employees more good days than bad.

This ties back to something that Tom Peters has said over and over: if you want to stand out in your market — any market — you must empower the people who serve the customer.

For a long while, too many companies have gotten by on financial and operational engineering instead, focusing on numbers (which is important) to the exclusion of the people their companies employ and serve (which is inexcusable).

Here’s hoping that the current downturn sparks a renaissance in employee satisfaction driving customer satisfaction.

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Photo by Kathy Mackey.

I’m thinking about this question because I’ve just been reading back through the comments on yesterday’s post about the failings of e-mail in the workplace.

Setting aside my own replies, it’s 900+ words of insight (plus one short zombie joke) from veteran businesspeople coming at the problem of e-mail inefficiency from several different angles. Worth a read.

But hey, I’m a blogger, so I’m spoiled — the comment box is always right there, and anyway that’s what blog readers are supposed to do when they have thoughts on a post.

But you’re in business, right? So you also have an audience, even if it’s not as obvious. It could be your customers, your partners, your bosses, your peers, your suppliers, your end-users. But it’s somebody, because no business deals exclusively with computers or robots on the other end of the line.

I got a mini-tutorial in e-mail handling, office communication, and Lean management techniques from yesterday’s comment thread. What kind of education could you be getting?

Do this:

• For starters, go to Chris Brogan’s blog and read “Grow Bigger Ears in 10 Minutes.” Implement what Chris suggests — you really will be done in ten minutes, start to finish.
• Tomorrow when you get to the office, make a list of five people inside your company and five people outside it who might be able to teach you something about how your company works and how you fit into that. Call or e-mail or tweet or IM or smoke-signal these people.
• When the results of Chris’s bigger-ears method start flowing in, seek out the people who are talking about you or your company or your product or your competitor’s products. Find out everything you can from what they say online. Write it down. Connect it to action items that you will do within a week. If it’s appropriate, reach out to the people doing the talking. See if they’re willing to talk even more — especially if they’re reporting bad news to you.
• If your company doesn’t have a blog or a Twitter account or a Facebook page or a suggestions-and-complaints inbox, consider implementing all of them within the month. At this point, the burden of proof is on whoever inside your organization thinks you don’t need them.
• Don’t interrupt and don’t “correct” what anyone says — absorb it and learn from it, even if it’s invalid. People think what they think for some reason.
• Follow up, follow up, follow up.

The audience is ready to start talking to you. Don’t merely let them — empower them.

What are you waiting for?

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Photo by Adam Fletcher, used under a CC-No Derivative Works license.

Last week we hosted a webinar along with our friends from Miller Heiman. The session focused on the findings of Miller Heiman’s annual best-practices survey. They’ve been doing the survey long enough that they have an excellent methodology worked up, which allows them to compare world-class sales organizations to the run of the mill.

As you might guess, the differences between the two groups are many, but one finding in particular jumped out at me. In response to the statement “We always review the results of our solution with strategic accounts,” world-class companies agreed at a 90 percent rate. And the non-world-class outfits? Try 42 percent.

Let me put that in another, even more horrifying, way:

58 percent of so-so sales organizations failed to review the results of what they sold with their strategic accounts.

This is one of the things that convinces me that good outfits have a great chance to weather the current economic storm: 58 percent of your competition is sleeping on the job. That’s what it means when 58 percent of your competition can’t figure out how to follow up with their most important customers.

Things that will keep you out of that woeful 58 percent:

• Calling up recent purchasers and asking “How are we doing?” or “How’s the service working out for you?” or “Are you happy?” or “Are you getting your money’s worth from us?”
• E-mailing a short survey.
• Stopping by to see a customer whose store or office is on your way — or out of your way.
• Calling up long-time customers and asking “How are you holding up in this market?” or “What more can we be doing for you?” or “You’ve been with us a long time, and I want you to know we don’t take you for granted. Are you getting what you need from us?”
• Scheduling a conference call or an in-person visit to go over all the parts of the working relationship between you and the folks representing your strategic accounts.
• Calling up your customers alphabetically, or by date of contract, or by height, and saying “How are you doing?” and “How can we help?” Yes, I realize I’m repeating myself, but apparently this topic requires remedial lessons.

Use the phone, e-mail, telegram, smoke signals, anything . . . but get in touch with your customers, and especially your strategically important ones. Persist in this until you start hearing the bad news that’s been hiding.

In these market conditions, “Oh, fine” is not a great answer to “How’s the product helping you?” But silence from the customer in response to unasked questions from the sales force — that’s even worse.

Get on the phone.

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Related:

• Just desserts.
• Customer ANYTHING.

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Photo by macinate, used under a Creative Commons license.

Stopped by the post office early this morning — why, yes, I was mailing my tax return — and needed a stamp. I even had a pocketful of quarters to make it easier.

See that stamp machine in the picture? They didn’t have one of those. They didn’t have a simple scale, either. They had an Automated Postal Center, which works like an ATM and which, no doubt, is great if you need to mail a pillow or a lawnmower or a bucket of live fish to someplace interesting. Lots of options, is what I’m saying.

Too many options. Menu after menu. Way too much to read and navigate.

• Priority Mail? No.
• Needs insurance? No.
• Anything hazardous in the package? No.
• Irregular shape? No.
• Specifically which zip code is it going to? Shouldn’t matter — it’s just domestic First Class mail . . . but it looks like I have to enter it anyway.
  
• Can it fit a big address label like the one we’re showing you on the screen? No.

Et cetera.

Oh, and my quarters were useless, because the machine doesn’t take cash.

Oh, and I had to buy an extra stamp, because I only needed 59¢ of postage, but the minimum order on the machine is $1.

My complaint isn’t that the thing has so many menus. There will be somebody who does need to ship a balalaika to Kazakhstan, insured, with a computer-printed address label, in the middle of the night — and the APC will be useful to them.

My complaint is that the very first screen didn’t have “Send standard First Class letter” as an option.

One button to push, the machine figures weight and postage, and you’re on your way.

It’s easy to make fun of the Post Office. But now turn your gaze upon yourself: what are you doing that leaves your customers shaking their heads and saying “I just wanted to buy a stamp”?

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Image by lorenzo montagna, used under a Creative Commons license.

Among many gems in Warren Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, this one stood out:

“The way to achieve this goal is to deserve it.”

There’s lots of pain in the business world these days, and far be it from me to add to yours. But it’s worth asking yourself . . .

• Are you actively working to deserve your customer’s business?
• If you’re going to avoid the layoff ax, will it be because you’ve earned it?

You might lose the customer anyway. You might lose your job anyway. The current economy is like that. I know plenty of good vendors who’ve seen contracts terminated, and plenty of good workers who’ve been handed the pink slip, even though the company doing the terminating hated to see them go.

But you don’t have to make it easy for the customer to walk away, or easy for the employer to cut off your paycheck.

Against gimmicks.

One of the reasons I like Buffett is that he represents, in many ways, the triumph of substance over style. He’s not a perfect man, but he’s earned the prestige he enjoys. Let me urge the same pursuit for you, just like I try to pursue it for myself.

What not to do:

• Anything that relies on the slickness of the marketing / packaging / line of talk to cover up the fundamental reality of the thing inself.
• Hide costs.
• Bait-and-switch.
• Pressure the user into something they don’t need or can’t use.

What to do:

• Deliver value.
• Pick up the customer hotline on the first ring. Then listen.
• Make problems go away for your users, even if doing so doesn’t earn you an extra dime right this minute.
• Hustle!

That’s how you earn your piece of the pie.

What would you add to this?

~

Related posts:

• The Basic Basics — an Omnibus.
• Happiness is a clear set of acquisition criteria.

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Photo by Stu Spivack, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Workin’ in the call center

Many years ago now, I worked for a few months in a call center for a credit-card company. The good news is that I was assigned to a group of reps that primarily handled accounts for high-end business travelers, who typically had plenty of money to spend and never ran into problems paying their bills.

The bad news was that . . . I was working in a call center for a credit-card company. I admire people who can do that work over the long haul, because inevitably you run into a lot of grief from customers who are unhappy because:

1. they screwed up;
2. the bank screwed up;
3. they’re in denial about what they can and can’t afford to spend;
4. their mama didn’t love them; or
5. whatever.

The big challenge for me was not to assume that the reason for the anger was #1, #3,  #4, or something similar. I worked for a well-run, non-predatory company that’s now part of JPMorgan Chase, but that didn’t mean that the bank was perfect — we made mistakes, too.

On top of that, even when #1, #3, or #4 was true, I couldn’t help the person on the phone — even if only to get them off the phone — if I didn’t LISTEN.

The same old lesson

“Sure, sure,” I can hear you saying. “Everybody should listen better. Of course.”

Yet we need reminding of it constantly. A wakeup call on this point came for me a few months back when I read this James Fallows item praising the interviewing acumen of Terry Gross:

She also avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.

What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads (”Now, that’s an intriguing idea, tell us more about…”), to look for interesting tensions (”You used to say X, but now it sounds like…”), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said (”It sounds as if you’re suggesting…”). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.

As a journalist and analyst, I’ve been on both sides of a lot of interviews, and I can confirm everything Fallows says.

The business application

It’s pretty simple, but bears repeating ad nauseam: If you’re going to solve someone’s problem, you have to listen to them to figure out what the problem is.

Somewhere, some customer of yours is confused or upset about something you could easily clear up. You could explain what needs explaining. You could rectify a mistake. You could undo a change they don’t like. But you don’t know what the “something” is yet, because you haven’t heard them.

So find them and listen to them so you can help them and, just for icing on the cake, learn from them.

Everything I’m saying here becomes even more important if you’re not in a customer-facing role, and an order of magnitude more important if you’re an executive in a non-customer-facing role. It’s much easier than we ever like to admit to miss the point if you’re not constantly in touch with the people who are actually using what you sell. When you take the chance to really listen, you’ll be shocked by how much your customer service reps know that you don’t.

I’ve talked many times about Peter Drucker’s “naive questions” — things like . . .

• Who are your customers?
• What do they want?
• Are you giving it to them?
• Are you making it easy?

Hold your own feet to the fire about asking and answering these questions — and make sure that the answers you get are based on listening to the customers themselves.

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Further reading:

• Matt Dickman: Three keys to better listening

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Photo by Stian Rødven Eide, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Ripped from the comments on the post “Customer ANYTHING”:

How is your company like the [bureaucratic] Gas company and who does the policy benefit? If the policy is about making it easier for you, for management, for reporting, for record keeping, then it is time to change your policy.

Thanks to Maria for putting it in such clear terms.

Best misunderstood headline of the day:

US Airways: Free drinks in coach

For a second after I first read it, I thought that US Airways would offer a free alcoholic drink to each passenger. It would be easy enough, right? Imagine the flight attendant saying,

“We know times are tough right now, so for those of legal age who’d like one, please accept a glass of beer or wine with our compliments.”

But that would require innovation, wouldn’t it?

I asked around, and it turns out that at least one airline — the regional Canadian carrier Porter — already does this. Do you know of others?

More to the point, would you like it if an airline offered this?

My sense is that it could be a small, cost-effective way to show some empathy for passengers, especially those who have been stuck with checked-bag fees and long, pointless security lines.

What say you?

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Photo by Hawkins, used under a Creative Commons license.

A thought experiment:

What would you do if you could no longer use your main channel of communication to reach your customers?

• If you’re used to selling to them in person, could you do it over the phone in a pinch?
• If the phones in your call centers all went on the blink, would customers have any other way to get your attention? E-mail? IM? Twitter? Facebook?
• If you normally rely on drumming up business with mass advertisements in magazines or television, how would you replace those venues if, say, they became irrelevant?

(It’s with that last question that we leave the world of pure hypothesis and get right down into the messy kitchen of the consumer-goods companies and retailers. There’s water all over the floor.)

Why you should do this thought experiment:

It might help you think your way out of a cul-de-sac.

The easiest thing in the world is to keep doing what you’ve been doing . . . because it’s what you’ve been doing. To scrutinize your behaviors, especially the durable ones, is a hard thing to do. Which is why so many of us avoid it.

So make it safe. Pretend it’s just a thought experiment. Figure out what other channels you could use to put yourself “in harm’s way” with your customer — right out there where they couldn’t help but interact with you and give you their unvarnished opinion.

You might be surprised. You might find that your your emergency backup channel becomes a new express route into your customers’ lives.

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Photo by Lindsey T, used under a Creative Commons license.